"I spend a lot of time parenting because I'm home. A friend of mine told me that the average father sees each kid an average of twenty-two minutes a week, which I found almost unbelievable. Mine are in my hip pocket all the time. And I like it that way."
Kids quotes
Kids
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Kids quotes (page 82 of 613)
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"Guys like Henry and his buddies were an accident waiting to happen; the little kids' version of floods or tornadoes or gallstones."
"You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Or if you can paint, maybe you think--I did--that God put you on earth to blow your father away."
"What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just playground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn't be, could it? It was too horrible to think about."
"I feel better in my mind because I'm doing what God made me to do. He said, 'Go write books, Steve, and you'll be happy.' I'm happy now, and that has had an effect on my life and my relationship with my wife and kids and even my friends. I've always wanted to be a writer."
"Why does everyone think that I am a cruel and insensitive man? I mean, come on, I have kids... on my desk in little jars!"
"You know how it's going to end, but instead of spoiling things, that somehow increases your fascination. It's like watching a kid run his electric train faster and faster and waiting for it to derail on one of the curves."
"Want to know the best thing about teaching? Seeing that moment when a kid discovers his or her gift. There's no feeling on earth like it."
"Mrs. Cole was a perfect democrat. She hated all kids equally."
"I still think that of all the people doing top fiction today, John D. MacDonald is the best.He was my model as a kid. If there are people out there that want to write, all you need to do is read 20 of his stories to get an idea what it takes to make a story kick over."
"As a kid, death seemed boring to me. As an adult, I think that it seems more like a waste of everything. Somebody once said every time a professor dies, a library burns."
"I was under the influence of the early modern masters, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Hemingway, especially, when I was a kid. I reacted against writers like Barth and John Hawkes. I did not care for the post-modernist stuff; my allegiance was to realism."
"My oldest son always wants to race. He's kind of like me and it now has carried over to the other two. They're all pretty competitive now. We do stuff in the pool. They're like fish in water. They go all over the place. They're kids. They like to play, have fun and compete with everything they do."
"No kid is unsmart. Every kid's a genius at something. Our job is to find it. And then encourage it."
"Kids like my act because I'm wearing nose glasses. Adults like my act because there's a guy who thinks putting on nose glasses is funny."
"I had a guy who went out of way to help me get started and somehow saw something in me. I couldn't get my hands on a real guitar till I was fourteen. I always wanted one from the time I was a tiny kid. Music was bigger than life to me."
"I heard black people sing and the emotion was overwhelming to me. The power of that with all the built in sorrow and joy was just overwhelming to me as a little kid. It was the real deal."
"If a mute kid swears, should his mother wash his hands with soap?"
"When I was a kid I had a friend who worked in a radio station. Whenever we walked under a bridge, you couldn't hear what he said."
"When I was a kid, I never did funny things to get attention. I was never a funny person. I was never, like, 'Oh, wow. I could say this some day on stage.'"